BODY Shots” is a slick, lurid and pretentious movie that pretends to say something important and sophisticated about sex and love among 20-somethings in contemporary L.A.

But the vulgar, tone-deaf screenplay by David McKenna just isn’t up to the task, and the end result is an ultra-stylized, empty mess.

It’s a shame, because the movie boasts an attractive and capable cast, including the lovely Amanda Peet from TV’s “Jack and Jill.”

She plays a lawyer named Jane, who is lying on the bed in her apartment with (fully dressed) fellow lawyer Rick (Sean Patrick Flannery) when the film opens. The doorbell rings and a bedraggled, bleeding girl comes in and announces that she’s just been raped by the guy she was fooling around with earlier.

The movie then flashes back to the evening before. We see a quartet of unusually good-looking girls (Peet, Tara Reid, Emily Procter and Sybil Temchen) and four boys (Flannery, Jerry O’Connell, Ron Livingston and Brad Rowe) as they dress, drink and go out to a huge club.

There is then a series of flashes forward and back as we learn who hooked up with whom and how. In between, each of the eight characters turns to the camera and tells us his or her philosophy of sex. There’s also a nasty, bloody fight between the football player played by O’Connell and a bodyguard who rudely bumps him in the club.

Shawn (Rowe) the group’s token romantic, says he believes that “sex without love equals violence.” And the rape of Sara (Reid) by Mike (O’Connell) is presumably supposed to demonstrate the truth of this, even though he might not have actually raped her.

We see the incident from two perspectives, “Rashomon”-style, and neither character really remembers what happened. And they each have to be coached by their lawyer friends when the law gets involved.

Director Michael Cristofer uses lots of fashionable stylistic tricks: The action slows down or speeds up around two characters as they kiss; you hear people talking before you see them speak, etc.